In the morning, Jon went to find coffee and discovered that Rodman Hall provides not only coffee in the lounge, but a selection of fruit, yogurt, muffins, donuts and other treats. We were able to have breakfast before leaving the hotel, meaning we could immediately hit the trails!
We started out on the Laura Secord Legacy Trail which then leads to the Bruce Trail.
My smartwatch doesn’t usually capture a full hike uninterrupted but on this day it did a good job of documenting the route:
By this time we were hungry again so we stopped into Henry of Pelham winery for lunch and a wine tasting. It rained while we were at the winery but we were kept dry under an umbrella and everything cleared up by the time we were ready to leave. We had been very lucky all trip with the weather and this day was no exception!
Once we were sufficiently rested and fed, we were back on the Bruce Trail. The goal was to get to the next winery, Flat Rock, all via the trail. We successfully completed the mission, however we did find this to be a challenging section of trail. We were carrying 30lb backpacks so that didn’t make things any easier. At the end of the trail we came upon Louth falls, which was a nice finale to a beautiful albeit difficult-at-times hike.
At Flat Rock we were treated to a garden setting with live music. We ordered a pitcher of sangria and tried our best not to disturb the other patrons with our red hot sweatiness.
The view from the Flat Rock bottle shop and tasting room is absolutely amazing, and you can see Toronto in the distance! We noticed this from a few places in Niagara.
The sangria did it’s best but we could not be energized to hike any further. We called an Uber and made our way to our accommodations for the next 2 nights, Inn On The Twenty. We freshened up and put on much nicer clothing and headed out to Pearl Morissette winery for a multi-course tasting. We were very excited about this meal and even planned around it to ensure we were in the area on a day that the restaurant was open. We booked our hotel due to its proximity to the restaurant as well, and we walked over for our 8:30pm reservation.
Interestingly, we had initially planned to dine at the restaurant on Sunday July 7 (the following evening) but due to a collaboration dinner being held at the restaurant that night, we had to switch to Saturday the 6th instead. As fate would have it, we were able to snag tickets to the dinner on the 7th as well, so we were lucky enough to be able to dine at this special restaurant two times on our trip, both with very different menus and experiences. The details of the collaboration dinner will be posted in the Day 5 post!
The tasting menu was everything we imagined it would be. The dishes were flavourful and inventive, and it’s a treat to be able to try so many different small plates for one meal. We got the wine pairing option as well and had wines produced by Pearl Morissette as well as other producers from around the world. It was a great night that we won’t soon forget!
After dinner it was very dark so we called an Uber and rested up for the next day when we would hike out to Ball’s Falls for a day hike without our packs! Below are some new/interesting/rare birds we heard on our our hikes on Day 4, as well as our step count/distance for the day.
